Hillary: Discovering My Emails Wasn’t a Public Service

5 Oct 2015

Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argued that she would not attack Karl Rove or Dick Cheney if they had private emails the same way the GOP has gone after her and denied that discovering her emails was a public service on Monday’s broadcast of NBC’s “Today.”

Hillary was asked, “you mention your Republican rivals making hay of this. I have to ask you, if the tables were turned, and it was Dick Cheney or Karl Rove who had a private email account and a private server, on which they conducted all their government business, would you be as understanding?”

She responded, “I would never have done that. Look at the situation they chose to exploit, to go after me for political reasons, the death of four Americans in Benghazi. I knew the ambassador. I identified him. I asked him to go there. I asked the president to nominate him. There have been seven investigations, led mostly by Republicans in the Congress, and they were non-partisan, and they reached conclusions that, first of all, I and nobody did anything wrong, but there were changes we could make. This committee was set up, as they have admitted, for the purpose of making a partisan political issue out of the deaths of four Americans. I would have never done that, and if I were president and there were Republicans or democrats who were thinking about that, I would have done everything to shut it down.”

Later in the interview, after Hillary continued her criticism of the Benghazi Select Committee, was questioned on whether discovering her emails was “a public service?” She said, “No. I mean, no. I mean, before this whole thing, you know, was a big controversy, you know, the State Department was looking for information. My emails were on the government account, more than 90% of them. The State Department was pulling them out. They’d been handed over. So, you know, look, I’ve been around this political situation for a long time, but some things are just beyond the pale, and I’m happy to go, if it still is in operation, to testify. I’m happy to turn over my emails. I’ve gone further than anybody ever has. That’s okay. I’m willing to do that, but, the real issue here is what happened to four brave Americans.”

Earlier, anchor Savannah Guthrie asked Hillary, “On the one hand, you’ve said sorry, and you’ve apologized for the confusion that it creates. On the other hand, sometimes you say it’s the work of your Republican rivals going after you. It’s the same old partisan attacks, and I guess my question to you is, which is it?”

Hillary responded, “Well, actually it’s both. I mean, I’m sorry that I made a choice that has resulted in this kind of, you know, situation and I’ve said I made a mistake. Obviously, if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t, it was allowed, and everybody has confirmed that, but it’s also as we now know, very clearly the way that the Republicans are trying to bring my, as they admit, poll numbers down. So, you know, I’m very committed to answering questions and being as transparent as possible. I’m scheduled to testify before their committee, which we now know is nothing but a partisan exercise. So, it’s really both, Savannah. It’s both, hey, you know what, turn the clock back, it was allowed. I was thinking about many other things than my email account when I became secretary of state.”

Guthrie then asked, “Do you get how bad it looks? It looks like you set up a personal server, you set up your own email, so that you would have control of those emails, and you and you alone would decide when to release, whether to release them, and in fact, that is what happened.”

Hillary answered, “Well, Savannah, first of all, it was allowed, and I’ve said, it wasn’t the best choice, and every government official gets to decide what is personal and work-related. If I’d had two separate accounts, as many people do, obviously, I would have decided every hour what was personal, what was work-related. The law also says that the official gets to determine that, and that’s what I did, and I have gone further than anybody that I’m aware of in American history, now, it’s not a long history because we haven’t had emails that long, but as long as we’ve had them, I’ve gone longer and farther to try to be as transparent as possible. Nobody else has done that, and by the time this is over, I’m a little, you know, I’m a little embarrassed that the emails are so boring in many instances, but, they will all be out there, and people will be able to make their decisions.”